Tennessee

Over the weekend, ABC, CBS and CNN all hyped the case of a lawsuit filed against a Tennessee police department after body cam audio revealed White County Sheriff Odie Shoupe suggesting that he gave orders to shoot and kill a suspect during a police chase partly to avoid damaging his police cars. In recalling the story, reporters made it sound like the driver, Michael Dial, had done little more than drive on a suspended license as they failed to inform viewers of his dangerous actions and his criminal history.

Its journalistic pulse stopped when its editor, Louis Graham, apologized for the paper's three-word front-page headline after the July 7 race-motivated massacre of five Dallas policemen, which read: "Gunman Targeted Whites."

The establishment press's obsession with labeling anything it and the left don't like as "controversial" has rarely been as obvious as in the case of Tennessee's move to allow full-time university faculty and staff to carry handguns on campus.

One particularly blatant example of "controversial" bias in connection with the Volunteer State law appeared Monday evening at the Washington Post's Grade Point blog. Naturally, the "C-word" appeared in the item's headline:

Should a devout Christian, Orthodox Jew, or Muslim marriage counselor be sued in a state court because he or she declined to take a gay or lesbian married couple as clients? It seems patently ridiculous, right? After all, these religious traditions all reject same-sex marriage as immoral and sinful. But for liberals in the media, a proposed law in Tennessee to protect the religious freedom of marriage counselors is a troubling development that may promot "discrimination."

"Yet another 'religious freedom' bill stands on the brink of becoming law," MSNBC.com's Emma Margolin sighed in the lead paragraph of her April 6 story, "Tennessee the latest red state poised to approve 'religious freedom' bill."

After hailing the Marxist-flavored brand of "liberation theology" Catholicism in Latin America on its front page May 24, the New York Times demonstrated more strange new respect for religion of the left-wing variety, with an adulatory profile of Sister Megan Rice, imprisoned for breaking into a uranium-enriching facility and splattering the building "with blood and antiwar slogans," which the online headline benignly terms "anti-nuclear activism."

The National Rifle Association annual meeting in Nashville drew nasty coverage from Anita Wadhwani, who reports for the Tennessean and for USA Today. On Saturday, the local paper reported “At NRA, little love for media turnout.” The NRA’s not used to fair and balanced coverage.

Wadwhani dramatically underscored their hostility on Monday with a story headlined “Big conventions, like NRA, can draw sex trafficking.” Commenters quickly jumped on the argument that the Tennessean wasn’t using that crooks-from-outside-town tactic for the home games of the Titans or the Country Music Association Awards.

In mid-February, the United Auto Workers lost a crucial unionization vote at a Chattanooga, Tenn., Volkswagen auto plant. Rather than licking their wounds and accepting the outcome, a slew of liberal pundits, including MSNBC's Ed Schultz, cried foul and agitated for the United Auto Workers to call on the federal government to essentially insist on a do-over election, predicated on the notion that pro-right-to-work politicians tainted the vote by their public pronouncements on the election.

Fast forward to today, when the UAW at long last decided that it would not press the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for another election. "Union throws in the towel," lamented the teaser headline on MSNBC.com this afternoon. Ned Resnikoff filed a brief story which portrayed the UAW as the hapless victims of shadowy right-wingers rather than a union which, well, could simply NOT make its case to the voters in a free and fair election (emphasis mine):

File this one under wishful thinking -- or simply just another case of a liberal newspaper trying to help President Barack Obama's floundering re-election effort. The Tennessean, the daily newspaper in Tennessee's capital city Nashville, over the weekend trumpeted this headline: "Vanderbilt Poll: Obama Closes Gap With Romney."

According to the article, Obama is just one point behind Romney in one of the reddest states in the South, a state John McCain won in 2008 by 15.1 percentage points over Obama. It's also a state where the Republican Party captured near two-thirds majorities in both houses of the state legislature in 2010 and where voters chose Republicans in 7 of 9 congressional districts. The state has a popular Republican governor elected in landslide that same year, and both its U.S. Senators are Republicans.

According to Poole, the Masjid Al-Noor mosque in Memphis posted an event entitled "A Weekend with Mohammed al-Hanooti" for the non-weekend dates of July 13 through 15 on its website. He has a screenshot of the mosque's event page and says that it is genuine, however, local Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal's Michael Lollar disputed Poole's findings in an article entitled "Hamas fundraiser not speaking at mosque."

Lollar only addressed the side of the mosque's administrators. According to Poole, Lollar made no attempt to contact him and Lollar's language in the article was dismissive of Poole's post, to the point of making it seem as though independently verifiable facts used by Poole were merely allegations and suppositions.

See, the thing that makes crazy people, well... crazy, is that they don't do things like normal people. Laws, rules, even simple human kindness is meaningless to such unbalanced people. The same can be said of criminals. See the thing that makes them criminals is that they don't obey laws. But the Memphis Commercial Appeal's Rich Locker seems to think making a law will magically make a wacko suddenly heed reason. On top of that, to illustrate his allusion he conflates the criminal actions of a man in Alabama to laws in Tennessee in order to justify his anti-gun sentiment for Tennesseans. Will these disingenuous Old Media types never learn a love of logic?

The tragic and criminal actions of the nut in Alabama that killed 10 people in a wild traveling rampage served as Locker's platform to advocate for a Tennessee law that would make illegal the carrying load guns in a vehicle. He seems to insinuate that such a law would have prevented the sicko in Alabama from driving around killing people. Locker neglects to reveal how some words on a piece of paper, though, could prevent a madman from transporting a loaded gun in a car.

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